Challenges and opportunities in broadband and wireless communication designs

Communication designs form the fastest growing segment of the semiconductor market. Both network processors and wireless chipsets have been attracting a great deal of research attention, financial resources and design efforts. However, further progress is limited by lack of adequate system methodologies and tools. Our goal in this paper is to provide impetus for development of communication design techniques and tools. The first part addresses network processors (NP) that we study from three viewpoints: application, architecture, and system software and compilation tools. In addition to summary of main issues and representative case studies, we identify main system design issues. The second part of the tutorial focuses on wireless design. The main emphasis is on platform-based design methodology that leverages on functional profiling, architecture exploration, and orthogonalization of concerns to facilitate low-power wireless communication systems. The highlight of the paper, an in-depth study of the state-of-the-art wireless design, PicoRadio, is used as explanatory design example.